Essay | Crowdsourcing
By John D. Thomas
The word “crowdsourcing” was first used in 2006 by writer Jeff Howe in an article he contributed to Wired. As Wikipedia haughtily explains, the term “is a portmanteau of ‘crowd‘ and ‘outsourcing.’”
But just what does that mean?
Wikipedia itself is possibly the most popular example of crowdsourcing . The concept of crowdsourcing involves organizing scores of people who are connected digitally to tackle a task. In Wikipedia’s case, the group creates an online encyclopedia. And while this may sound like a recipe for informational sloppy seconds, in 2005, the journal Nature compared articles about scientific topics published on Wikipedia to those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. According to a BBC News article, they “found few differences in accuracy.”
Essay | How do you know who is blogging?
By Karen Dybis
Hello, open-minded readers. My name is Karen Dybis. I am a freelance journalist in the Metro Detroit area who writes newspaper articles, magazine stories and blogs at night as my two children sleep one floor above me.
Fact or fiction? Luckily for you, the previous paragraph is true. The reality is I could be anyone living anywhere and writing just about anything. And I could be pretty convincing. I am a professional writer, after all.
The key to my identity may be the word “professional.” How I represent myself online matters to me. However, there are others in the wide-open world of journalism profession who have proven to be top-notch hucksters, finding an audience for what they purport to be journalism. And, as anyone who has ever listened to shock-jock radio knows, the public can be easily deceived.
Essay | Seeing isn’t Believing: Photo Manipulation in the Digital Age
By Kalyn Belsha
When Rich Lam went to bed early on the morning of June 16 last year, he had no reason to suspect he’d wake up to a media frenzy.
The night before, Lam was on assignment for Getty photographing riots in Vancouver after the city’s hockey team, the Canucks, lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins. According to Canadian news reports, several people were stabbed during the riots, cars were set on fire, stores were looted and police carrying shields moved in to control the crowd.
Lam had shot protests and riots before, so the dangerous environment was nothing new to him. At one point while Lam was standing behind a police line, he snapped a few frames of what he believed to be a man helping a woman who’d fallen in the street. The pair were about 30 to 50 yards away, so Lam zoomed in, making sure the woman’s legs were in focus. Then he “never looked at that photo again.”
Essay | Friends, Followers and Retweets : Journalistic Objectivity in the Digital Age
By Meg Heckman
In a fit of professional panic late one night, I surveyed the political leanings of my Facebook friends. How many supported Democrats? How many favored Republicans? Who had plastered their profiles with images promoting Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association?
It was late 2006, and I was a reporter covering politics in New Hampshire. When Facebook had opened to the pubic that fall, I’d joined mostly to keep in touch with my younger brother. Pretty soon, I’d accepted friend requests from many of the political operatives I’d met covering the 2004 elections. They weren’t my friends in a traditional sense, but I saw value in those connections. Still, I worried about how publicly linking myself to these people would affect the unbiased image I cultivated as a journalist.
Essay | Robot Ethics
By Isabel Eva Bohrer
“If not yet the world, robots are starting to dominate the news headlines,” writes Patrick Lin in his introduction to Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics. For years, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence have been performing tasks in factories and making mass production easier than ever. The automation process has slowly transitioned into other areas as well. Robots now are used by militaries to attack enemies and serve as caregivers for infants and the elderly. There are robots used as sex toys, and robots that facilitate surgeons in performing difficult operations.
With new qualities and new responsibilities come new ethical questions. Who is responsible for the actions carried out by a robot? What happens when something goes wrong? Are there laws that prevent humans from abusing robots, and vice versa? What happens when robots start making ethical decisions? Wherein lies the ethical boundary between which tasks robots can perform, and which ones they can’t?
@digethics
- How do you know who is blogging? Karen Dybis digs into the subject of online identities: http://t.co/CoFdITYG
- Call for papers The center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University Chicago (http://t.co/EyG4DECe) will be... http://t.co/4tg6HHgP
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